Apple Acquires Personal Assistant App Cue

Thursday October 3, 2013 1:55 pm PDT by Juli Clover

Apple has acquired Cue, a personal assistant app that was designed to aggregate information from email, contacts, and calendars into a daily snapshot, reports AppleInsider. MacRumors heard similar rumors about the potential acquisition several weeks ago, but we were unable to verify the claim. The deal has reportedly netted Cue (formerly known as Greplin) $40 to $60 million dollars.

In response to queries about the reports, Apple seemingly confirmed the acquisition to CNET and TechCrunch with its standard statement: "Apple buys smaller technology companies from time to time, and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans."

Cue turns your email, contacts and calendar into an intelligent snapshot of your day. All you need to create a Cue account is an email address. Then you can begin linking your Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Google Calendar, Facebook and all the other accounts that you depend on every day. Cue pulls these accounts together and uses sophisticated algorithms to create a personalized overview of the events and activities of your day.

Earlier this week, Cue unexpectedly shut down, posting a short note on its website letting users know that the Cue service is no longer available. TechCrunch speculated the shut down was likely the result of a sale due to the amount of funding Cue had raised. The app has since been pulled from the App Store.

Cue's aggregation functionality could potentially be built into a number of Apple products, including Siri. Apple’s iOS 7 Notification Center already offers a similar daily overview, pulling events and information from the Calendar, Weather, Clock, and Maps apps. The information is dynamic, shifting based on new events and location.

How ironic considering Steve Jobs always maintained Apple was a software company. Yet it seems they are behind other companies when it comes to software and cloud services.

It is better than a lot of companies as well. Apple's HTML iCloud based apps are very nice. I prefer its mail services over other popular options. It is improving in other areas. Google has an advantage for some services as it has more data, but Apple is catching up.

Maybe, however there is a bit of PR here too. Buying the third party developers whose ideas they like looks a heck of a lot better than ripping off their ideas and killing them off.

There is also the recruitment, i.e. acqui-hire angle.

That's really most of it, recruitment. Maybe a small company has some interesting patents or proprietary algorithms, but mostly this sort of thing is about Apple snatching up developers they think are particularly talented, or have expertise in areas Apple wants to add to their arsenal. Apple definitely doesn't do this for PR, though, or they'd be more open about such acquisitions. Apple is notoriously quiet about this sort of thing, and if it wasn't for rumor sites and very Apple-interested tech media, we wouldn't hear anything about it.

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